Adam and Eve sit in a pomegranate tree.

Everyone has picked a fruit, the full moon shines as they pass each other the delicious red seed coats, and two branches away a snake is smiling in the tree: Anyone who has ever heard of the Garden of Eden, who knows the story of creation in the Bible, thinks they know what comes now

However, in the picture book “One Night in Paradise”, which tells a little story from the estate of the Swiss author Jürg Schubiger, who died in September 2014, about pictures by Rotraut Susanne Berner, one cannot be so sure.

The scene described is the final scene of this book, the two have just made a breathtaking discovery, and: no, it's not about the tree of knowledge.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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They had come to philosophize.

Eva had boasted that she could count the stars in the sky, but that she had better things to do.

Admittedly, after Adam's skeptical question, she needs a moment to figure out what that is supposed to be.

"Think," she then said, for example about eternity and about paradise." As she says this, the tree next to which the two are lounging on a cushion of moss is supporting the tree whose fruit they are finally feasting on along with many animals, not even flowers.

Alongside the moon and the two, it is the only thing that remains in Rotraut Susanne Berner's pictures.

As accessible and open as the artist's bright tempera paintings appear in her well-known Himmel books, in which she accompanies several dozen characters through a small town, day and night, the seasons: what she associates with her couple in paradise shows Berner's unmistakable color and play of shapes.

The compositions, meanwhile, sometimes seem like something taken from a biology book, sometimes strangely surreal: various animals and plants can be seen in the most varied stages of development, protozoa, insects and dinosaurs, even the double helix of the DNA molecule.

Some mammals hover, as in Chagall, and on the thin line that separates the paradisiacal atmosphere from the firmament in the pictures, birds have joined together with similarly sized insects,

The starry sky bears witness to the progress of a night, the phases of the moon to half a month, while the pictures tell the counterpart of the story of creation, which Jürg Schubiger's anecdote from paradise plays with: the origin of species is indicated, the development of individual creatures - in a pond the different stages are lined up from the tadpole to the frog – and even picture book fans aged ten and over, recommended by the publisher, will be happy to find their way through the swarm of pictorial allusions with adult support.

As static as the view of the couple remains in these pictures, they are unaffected by the parade around them: their relationship suddenly gains momentum, and the conversation between Adam and Eve also develops – initially in a bad direction.

She admits that one day she might get tired of "this paradise forever, these kangaroos, these wildebeests and cockatoos".

Whereupon he commands her, what else does she want, and she yells back that she doesn't really care about more, but rather about less: "We have nothing left to wish for here." Then a flash of lightning flashes across Berner's gray sky, Plants and animals show their spines.

In 1996, Jürg Schubiger and Rotraut Susanne Berner received the German Youth Literature Prize for their book “When the world was still young”.

"When the world was young, life had to be learned," says this children's book.

This is unquestionably true of One Night in Paradise, too, regardless of the evolutionary ages that pass before the eyes of the fascinated viewer in this new picture book.

After all, the two residents in Jürg Schubiger's delightful story finally take a big step in life learning with Adam's invention, with a breathtaking discovery that frees Eva from her dissatisfaction, Adam from his helplessness and the two from their conflict: the kiss.

Jürg Schubiger, Rotraut Susanne Berner: "One night in paradise"

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Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal 2022. 24 p., hardcover, €18.

From 10 years